New fundraiser for the SLO Poetry Festival

The San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival will turn 30 this year. To commemorate this milestone, festival co-founder and curator Kevin Patrick Sullivan is raising money to not only pay the event’s featured poets, but also fund a literary journal called Language of the Soul: A Celebration of 30 Years at the San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival. Sullivan is currently fundraising for the project on indiegogo.com, where his goal is $10,000 by Sept. 17.

Sullivan has worked as a groundskeeper for the San Luis Coastal Unified School District for the past 23 years. In 1984, he started Corners of the Mouth, a series of monthly readings that has been held at Linnaea’s Café every third Sunday since. The anthology he's raising money for would include poets from both the SLO Poetry Festival and Corners of the Mouth.

“Your contributions will make real in the world the many voices heard over the years,” Sullivan writes on his campaign page, “voices like Ray Clark Dickson, Glenna Luschei, Hernan Castellano Giron, Ann Candelaria, Lorna Dee Cerventes, Sam Hamill, Eavan Boland, Carol Muskie Dukes, Al Young, Clayton Eshleman, Eleanor Lerman and Nellie Wong to name just a few. This will be an extraordinary anthology of contemporary American Poetry. It will be a delight to hold in your hands, the words of the poet coming to life with your breath.”

Funding of the project is flexible, so the campaign will receive everything donated even if its goal is not reached. Sullivan plans to use the money raised to pay the poets first—his goal is to give each featured poet a minimum of $100—and what’s left will go toward the journal.

Each donor who gives $50 or more will be entitled to a copy of Language of the Soul when it is printed in November 2014.

To help out, search the 30th Annual San Luis Obispo Poetry Festival on indiegogo.com. For more information on the festival and Corners of the Mouth, visit languageofthesoul.org or search the festival’s page on Facebook.